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Cell biology

Boa constrictor or rattlesnake?

Nature volume 398, pages 470–471 (1999)Cite this article

During nervous transmission, neurotransmitter-filled vesicles fuse with the presynaptic membrane. Endocytosis — an uptake mechanism involving invagination of the cell membrane — then follows, returning the fused membrane to the interior of the cell to be recycled. The protein dynamin is found at the neck of each endocytic invagination, or pit, and is essential not only for recycling of synaptic vesicles, but for clathrin-dependent endocytosis from the plasma membrane of all cells.

The accepted role for dynamin is that it acts as a ‘pinchase’1,2 — that is, it self-assembles into a ring around the neck of a budding pit, then changes shape in response to binding or hydrolysis of GTP. It was assumed that this coordinated change in the conformation of the dynamin ring leads to constriction of the neck, and scission. On page 481 of this issue, however, Sever et al.3 propose that dynamin is not a mechanochemical transducer or ‘boa constrictor’, but that, like all other known GTPases, it acts as a switch, or ‘rattlesnake’, to regulate the endocytic step.

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Figure 1: Two models for the action of dynamin.

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  1. Department of Cell Biology Harvard Medical School, The Center for Blood Research, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA

    Tom Kirchhausen

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  1. Tom Kirchhausen
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Kirchhausen, T. Boa constrictor or rattlesnake? . Nature 398, 470–471 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/18989

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